2018-2019 season

We're excited! Over the past few seasons, our focus has been on exploring new works and crafting original takes on classics, sparking vital conversations among artists and audiences alike as we build our community.

The 2018-2019 season connects us as theater-makers and -experiencers not just in the present day, but with others throughout time. Whether they live in the past, present, or future, the characters in our upcoming plays grapple with the same issues that matter to us today, on this campus and in this valley, in ways that clarify our own perspectives and spark reflection.

We hope you come travel through time with us in the 2018-2019 season!

We start funny, with Dustin Chinn's pointed, futuristic comedy Snowflakes or Rare White People, in which a cadre of nearly-extinct white hipsters escape the museum exhibit in which they live, bringing perilous level of Caucasity to the rest of society. Snowflakes also marks the first time we've taken a play from our New Play Lab and brought it back for a full production, and we're so thrilled for a second opportunity to engage with Chinn's sly, hysterical commentary.

What of the Night? is a quartet of plays by Maria Irene Fornes, one of our greatest and most influential living playwrights. She takes a look at a different future, tracking the desperate characters who try to eke out a precarious living in the city's violent underground.

The original script of Wild Thing was written in 1613 by Luis Vélez de Guevara, yet it confronts gender in a way that feels astonishingly of-the-moment. Professor Harley Erdman created a brand-new translation of this long-ignored work that we can't wait to show you.

Play development is the heart of American theater, and UMass New Play Lab is our contribution to keeping that heartbeat strong. Each year, the team in charge of this project puts its own spin on things, and we can't wait to see how this year's group will innovate to bring us the best and brightest upcoming writers.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat deftly and unflinchingly examines the complicated ways race, class, and gender intersect in a struggling factory town. When you see it, you'll see why playwright Lynn Nottage received so many accolades for writing this play, which was created through interviews with the citizens of Reading, PA.